Persuasion (2022)

Carrie Cracknell's Persuasion arrives as a Jane Austen adaptation that has decided the original text was insufficiently aware of its own irony. Dakota Johnson plays Anne Elliot as a woman who has read the screenplay and finds it wanting, addressing the camera with a wry weariness that owes a visible debt to a certain television vicar. The Regency setting remains. The bonnets remain. The sensibility, however, has been airlifted in from a later century entirely, and the result is a costume drama wearing its costume ironically.

On the matter of casting, the film assembles a Regency aristocracy that history would not recognize, with Nikki Amuka-Bird and Henry Golding occupying titled roles the narrative never pauses to explain or interrogate. The gesture is presentational. Nobody in Bath remarks upon it, and the film has no interest in race beyond the optics of the ensemble. Anne herself has been rebuilt as an unconforming woman of modern sensibilities, a wine-drinking, wall-breaking heroine whose independence is offered up as the entire point of the exercise. She feels less like a woman of 1817 and more like a pitch deck for one.

The class commentary survives in trace amounts. The Elliots are snobs in debt, and Austen's quiet contempt for them comes through, though the film never sharpens it into anything resembling a modern indictment of wealth. What we get instead is a mild sermon on living authentically, delivered between glances at the lens. The whole affair is genial, anachronistic, and oddly frictionless. Austen's tension, the slow ache of a woman who has waited eight years, is replaced by a heroine who seems mostly fine. The film is not without charm. It is simply without persuasion.